The field of the invention relates generally to the generation of ticket security codes.
At least some known lottery tickets/receipts are designed to enforce integrity of the tickets/transactions. Lotteries need to ensure that a lottery ticket, which is a bearer bond, is not falsified. Lottery system vendors introduce various techniques to enforce integrity of data on the ticket, to be able to verify that the ticket data was not altered, and protect against ticket fraud, for example, printing of falsified winning tickets. At least some known examples of enforcing security of ticket information include using specialized and numbered paper stock, special indicia printed on the ticket, double printing of particular information, unique security codes printed on the tickets and an independent verification system used to verify ticket information and these codes. These types of verification systems are work offline, separated from the on-line systems for selling lottery tickets.
At least some systems use security codes printed on lottery receipts combined with reliable printing to provide security for printing on non-dedicated and non-numbered paper stock. To protect against insiders fraudulently printing valid lottery tickets these security codes are designed so that they cannot be recreated even with access to the lottery system. The information kept on the online system is not sufficient data to recreate the codes. To protect the content of the ticket the security codes contain a “checksum” or “hash” of the ticket data, so the alteration of the ticket would result in a changed hash/checksum. In at least one known approach of creating these types of security codes is based on using secret information to create the codes. This secret information is transferred securely to the ticket verification systems. To enforce integrity and privacy of the transfer of secret information, different encryption methods are used.
In these known methods, based on the secret information kept in a lottery terminal, carry an additional risk. Because the terminals are not in controlled locations and use standard operating systems and languages, there is a possibility that the secret information could be compromised.
At least some known existing methodologies work in a conventional, closed environment, where specialized lottery terminals are used to create and safeguard secret information used for generation of these security codes. However, such known methods are not applicable to computing environments that include “thin” (e.g., HTML or Adobe Flash applications) clients where very little or no programming is done on the remote (terminal) end.
These and other known methods, including those based on secrets and requiring custom software, are not practical for use on foreign terminals or standard Point of Sales (POS) devices (e.g. checkout registers) as at least some lotteries want to have.